“And if you come with me, or guard the rose palace for my return,” she said. “If you act as my retinue and my loyalists, if you help me find my fellow temple child, you will ensure that Ahiranya has hope. That it may survive, still, even if the empire turns upon us. So.” She looked between them. “Will you come?”
“We all know the tales of the temple council,” one cook said gruffly. “Some of us who were city born and raised met them in person. We know what was done to them. The children.” He looked down at his hands. Raw now, not just from cooking scars, but from handling a bow. “I’ll come.”
“I want to come too,” said the maidservant Sima. A few other voices joined in, offering their presence on the journey or their arrows on the palace’s walls.
“This won’t be an easy journey for any of us,” she said, once all the volunteers had spoken and roles had been delegated. “And to those of you who remain—I will pray every night for the strength of my thorns to hold.”
There was no rest after that. Only planning, and more planning, and then when she finally found a moment alone, to close her eyes, she heard footsteps. Looked, and saw the child with the rot upon him standing before her, a hopeful look in his eyes.
“Rukh,” she said. “What do you want?”
“I’m coming with you,” he said. “Aren’t I? You made me promise to serve you. So I must come. I need to help you find her.”
The journey ahead of them was not suitable for a child. She should have refused him. But leaving him behind would crush some of the hope in him. And she found she could not do that.
“Yes,” she said. “Go and pack your things.”
This journey was no place for her either. She could not even imagine her own child yet. When she tried to, she saw—nothing. Only felt the alienness of her own body, the tug and pain that pooled at the base of her spine. And yet she loved them, because they were her own, and breathed and dreamt with her.
“You deserve better than this,” she murmured, moving her hand back and forth over the curve of her stomach. Back and forth. “But here we are. The work must be done.”
PRIYA
A bed. A green bed. A bed of water. She was beneath a swirling river, and it was overgrown with lotus flowers, their roots snarled around her wrists and her throat.
She twisted and turned within them, disturbed by the fact that the liquid around her wasn’t cold but hot. She had a distant memory that it had been painful once, a scalding heat, but now it moved around her with the same warmth and sluggish consistency as blood.
She reached for her own throat, untangling the roots, rising to the water’s surface. She was in the sangam, or something that looked very like the sangam, with winding rivers, and stars racing in skeins and knots upon the water. But the water was deep, deep, and overfull of flowering blooms—lilies and other strange, curling flowers she had no names for.
She shouldn’t have been here. She had been somewhere else, only moments before. Hadn’t she? Malini holding her up. She remembered that. Malini holding her, and her voice, commanding Priya to remain with her, to stay, please—
Sapling. Look.
She looked again at the water she’d risen from. Through the dark, she saw a body.
Her own face lay beneath the sediment. Her own hair, a loose cloud of black fronds. Those were her own eyes, closed as if in sleep. From her chest bloomed a great lotus, bursting through exposed ribs. From her eyes streamed marigold petals, flecked gold and carnelian, seeping from beneath the closed lids.
Not a reflection. She knew it wasn’t that. And if she hadn’t been sure, she saw beneath it, in the slow shifting gray of the water’s bed, a dozen more tangled figures, held by lotus roots, their hair coiling in water, their bodies half root and half flesh, beautiful and strange.
The body that was so like her own, that lay above the rest, was moving. The mouth opened and within it was a flower that unfurled in thorns, virulent blue and black, its heart a cosmos.
She gave a gasp and shifted back in the water, trying to swim, to turn—but the ropes of those great lotus roots held her.
The body was rising from the water. Its eyes opened. Gold-petaled. Crimson as blood.
It waded toward her. Touched fingers to her jaw. Its fingers were warm as sacred wood. Its smile was red. It wasn’t her. Couldn’t be her.
It stroked her cheek.
“Look at you,” it said, in a voice that wasn’t her own. “You’re so new. And yet so hollow.”
“What are you?” Priya whispered.